One the most common diseases in the world is vascular disease, such as strokes, aneurysms or the abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). A rapid and safe diagnosis and the immediate introduction of treatment are of particular importance for the recovery process of diseases of this type.
The diagnosis of such diseases is supported by imaging methods. In this case, a CT examination is preliminarily carried out in order to precisely determine the extent of the hemorrhaging or of the part of the brain which is no longer supplied with blood. The dimension and form of the vascular deformation is determined in the case of an aneurysm or the AAA. The computer tomograph provides good diagnostic images of the soft tissue in question but CT devices are not able to provide any treatment due to poor patient accessibility. This therapy is generally always carried out with the support of an angiography C-arm x-ray system. The angiographic x-ray systems known to date do not offer an optimum soft tissue resolution and therefore do not allow cerebral hemorrhaging to be viewed for instance.
This results in the patient having to be transferred alley the CT examination into a room in which the angiographic x-ray examination can be carried out. This causes valuable patient treatment time to be lost Concepts in which the computer tomograph and the angiographic x-ray device are accommodated in one shared room offer an improvement. This solution is disadvantageous in that the patient still always has to be relocated and that two relatively expensive devices can be used for just one treatment.
Initial methods and devices for angiographic 3D images using a C-arm x-ray device are known. By way of example, 3D images of a skull and the vessels can be provided using an x-ray diagnostic device with a workstation. DE 102 41 184 A1 discloses a method of this type for generating a volume data set. Further examples for C-arm x-ray devices supplying 3D images are described in Electromedica 1/02 “Initial Clinical Experiences with the SIREMOBIL Iso-C.sup.3D” by Euler et al. on pages 48 to 51 in DE 100 47 364 A1, DE 199 50 793 B4 and DE 103 06 068 A1. As a rule, mobile devices do not radiate sufficient x-ray power and are thus only suited to a limited number of applications. DE 195 09 007 C2 discloses a C-arm x-ray diagnostic device for providing layer images. However, all known C-arm solutions are lacking an optimum display of capillary soft tissue.